Sales & Marketing

Fully recovered from his nearly-fatal run-in with a bus during the 2009 Super Bowl, Jack (namesake and fictitious founder of Jack in the Box restaurants) is entertaining web site visitors with playful interactive technology. Meanwhile, the IT team behind the scenes is working on several innovative projects to help Jack in the Box bring efficiency and effective communication tools to guests and franchisees. HT talks with CIO Debra Jensen and VP of systems development Michael Verdesca.

Jack in the Box's re-launched website features an interactive telephone, with Jack himself as the messenger, that lets users send personalized e-mails or phone calls; the perfect tool for talking football trash.

With BigHoller's BigHollerPOSConnect, menus and orders from online ordering are exported out in a standardized format readable by the POS system, providing detailed data for tracking, analysis, and marketing efforts.

A COLLOQUY-DMA survey results show the average social media spend for marketers whose primary objective is to obtain customer loyalty was $88,000 last year, compared to $53,000 for brand awareness and $30,000 for customer acquisition.

Designed to work with a brand's existing loyalty program or provide a platform upon which a brand can create a new one, Social Rewards monitors and tracks tweets, location based check-ins and fan activity.

This fall, the Restaurant Executive Summit will offer technology, finance, operations and marketing professionals a venue for fostering cross-departmental innovation.

Facebook Places lets mobile device owners with Facebook accounts share their exact location and find the whereabouts of their friends, writes Jon Swartz of USA Today.

A partnership between Sheraton and JiWire will allow advertisers the opportunity to reach on-the-go guests with localized messages based on their exact physical location in more than 200 hotels.